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Sometimes, four minutes are all you need to witness genius

Last August, the trailer for Spike Jonze’s Her appeared and thrilled fans who’d waited the requisite four years for his next film. Jonze made a remarkable debut 15 years earlier with a Charlie Kaufmanpenned story about a vent in an office that transports people inside the head of actor John Malkovich. Though Being John Malkovich marked him as a bracingly original voice – a fact confirmed by Adaptation and WhereThe Wild Things Are – Jonze was famous long before 1999. Remember the video for Sonic Youth’s “100%”, with a skateboarding Jason Lee, or The Breeders’ 1993 smash hit “Cannonball”? Both are by Jonze.

As he became better known, Jonze was able to experiment: “Sabotage” was a parody of Seventies cop shows; “Buddy Holly” looked like an episode of Happy Days. Working mostly with alt and indie bands, Jonze’s work was oddball but heartfelt – qualities also evident in his films. His video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” showed an inept (and fictional) dance group rehearsing in public. In someone else’s hands, it would have been a good gag but Jonze managed to turn it into a celebration of the joy of performance. It was voted the No 1 video of all time in a 2001 MTV poll.

Jonze is one of the directors who marked the beginning of the “auteur” generation of music videos, where the maker’s personality informed the output. An accepted signpost is 1992, the year MTV started mentioning the directors along with the bands. However, even the music channel’s first decade yielded some major Hollywood players. Any random hour of MTV Classic is likely to have a Fincher contribution: he was responsible for Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” and Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun”. By the time he made his film debut with Alien 3 in 1992, Fincher was already developing that dark, glossy look he’d use in Se7en and Fight Club – you can see it in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Billy Idol’s “Cradle Of Love”. Michael Bay started out in the late Eighties. His mini-movie for Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was as cheesy and high-octane as any of his Transformers films.

Another contemporary film-maker to make the transition from music videos to features and retain some measure of signature style is Michel Gondry. The Frenchman was the Jan Švankmajer of the music video – like the Czech surrealist, he used lo-fi visual effects to create a distorted, beyond-the-looking-glass world. The constant changes in scenery in his recent film Mood Indigo are in a similar vein to his innovations for Björk’s “Human Behaviour”, while his very affecting video for Gary Jules’ “Mad World” points to the melancholia of Eternal SunshineOf The Spotless Mind. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little MissSunshine), Jonathan Glazer (SexyBeast) and Anton Corbijn (Control) have also introduced aspects of their video-making style in their films. Is there a certain music video director approach to film-making?

One could draw parallels between the films of Dayton-Faris and Mike Mills, or Corbijn and Mark Romanek, but such comparisons can be misleading. For every example of a former video director cutting to music, you have a Wes Anderson (who’s never made a music video) doing the same, only better. More to the point is the way video and cinema have kept influencing each other. MTV-style editing is ubiquitous in cinema today, but its roots lie in Soviet film-makers’ experiments with montage in the Twenties. A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film starring the Beatles, was a major influence on the genre, as were DA Pennebaker’s vérité documentaries. Music videos, in turn, have given cinema new directors, sounds, faces, slogans, moves. It may have killed the radio star, but video is certainly repaying its debt to the movies.